Palm Sugar of Bay Nui

Seen from the bank of a distant rice field, the Khmer tapper at the very top of the thốt nốt palm looks no bigger than a bean. The tapper is taking down the bamboo tube that has caught sap all through the night. All around, the palm's leaves spread out round, like giant fans. The early morning dew still clings to them. Farther off, other palms stand just as tall, their crowns printed against a sky that has only just grown light.

Thốt nốt is the palmyra palm, a tall fan palm. Its flower stalks grow right at the top, in the middle of the spreading leaves. With that tube down, the tapper shaves a very thin slice off the tip of a flower stalk. That way the sap seeps out again, slowly, a little at a time. Then an empty tube is tied to the end of the flower cluster, to catch the fresh drops.

People call this work gathering honey halfway up the sky. Only grown-ups skilled in the trade do it. People also describe the craft this way: eating rice on the ground, working in the sky.

These palms grow in great numbers in the Bảy Núi area of An Giang province. They cluster around Tri Tôn and Tịnh Biên. They stand along the dikes between rice fields at the foot of the mountains and are scattered across the open fields. They show here and there above stretches of forest, and they grow in the gardens and behind the houses of Khmer families. Some rise high enough to shade old pagodas. Many people call the Tà Ngáo fields the capital of these palms. Even the name thốt nốt comes from a Khmer word, pronounced a little differently by the people of the area.

The Khmer use the leaves to roof their houses, to make conical hats and to make handicrafts. The trunks become house posts, tables, chairs and cabinets. And the sap caught at the top is for drinking and for boiling into sugar.

Only the female palms bear fruit. The fruit grows in bunches, like coconuts but smaller. Young fruit is green, and as it ages it turns purplish brown or black. People use the fruit to make cakes and candied sweets. But the sap the tapper collects up high seeps from the flower stalk, not from the fruit.

The palms are grown from seed. A single tree can live about a hundred years, longer than a human lifetime. Even so, the grower must wait many years before it starts to give sap. The palm loves the sun. It stands up to drought and to flooding alike, and it suits the dry hill soil of this area.

Sugar making is busiest in the dry season, the sunny months after the rains have passed. The hotter the weather, the more sap the trees give, and the sweeter that sap becomes. In the rainy months, the same batch of sugar takes far more sap to boil down than in the sunny season.

In this palm country, every morning is busy, both up in the treetops and down beside the stove. The sap must be gathered very early. Sap caught overnight cannot wait long. Left standing, it ferments and turns sour. So on that same morning, the cook must set the fresh sap on the fire and boil it into sugar.

Before long, the tapper has carried the night's bamboo tubes home. The first job is straining. The cook pours the sap through a thin cloth, and in some places through a sieve. The cloth catches bits of flower, along with the tiny insects that slipped into the tubes during the night.

Not all of the sap goes into the pan. Fresh thốt nốt sap is fragrant and very sweet. People drink it fresh, or cool over ice. They eat it with the soft, fragrant, cloudy white flesh of the young fruit.

The rest of the sap is poured into a large cast iron pan, set on a stove built of earth. The firewood inside catches and burns steadily, and heat rises against the bottom of the pan. Soon the sap begins to simmer.

The grown-ups of the house take turns at the pan. They stir it evenly and keep skimming off the foam that rises to the surface. Usually the women stir first. As time goes on, the sap grows thicker and the stirring grows heavier, and then the men take over. One after another, they keep stirring for many hours. A sweet smell drifts out of the kitchen and across the whole hamlet, growing stronger by the moment.

The sweet drops at the top of the palm also run through an old tale. The Khmer here have passed it down for generations. Long ago, the story goes, there was a cowherd. One noon, he lay resting in the shade of a thốt nốt palm and drifted off to sleep. Suddenly a drop of water fell from high above, straight into his mouth. He woke with a start. The drop was wonderfully sweet.

He sat up and looked all around, but saw nothing. Then he realized where the sweet drops came from. They were dripping from a palm shoot that had snapped across. He had a bamboo tube that held his drinking water, so he hung it up to catch this liquid, a gift from heaven. When it was done, he carried the bamboo tube home to show his wife and children.

Beside the stove, the sap in the cast iron pan is now nothing like what was first poured in. The surface bubbles and plops. The sap slowly thickens and turns syrupy, then takes on a bright yellow color. At that point, the grown-ups lift the whole heavy pan off the stove.

The pan is off the fire, yet the stirrers never rest, so that bright yellow color will hold. With every turn, the sugar grows a little thicker.

When the sugar is truly thick, they pour it into small round molds, and in some places into bamboo molds. As it cools, the sugar sets into golden cakes of thốt nốt sugar. Other households keep it as a thick syrup, stored in jars for later, or make it into thốt nốt candy.

The sugar cakes in the molds have not yet fully cooled. Out in the fields, at the top of a palm, sap is still seeping into a bamboo tube, from the very spot the tapper cut this morning. The snapped shoot of the old tale is, today, a thin slice made by a skilled Khmer tapper.